‘The strongest effects related to care delivery, including appropriate number of sessions, multidisciplinary team access and providers knowledgeable in eating disorders.’
Of everything the Medicare Eating Disorder Treatment and Management Plan gives a patient, the thing they rate most highly is having a team of health professionals. That is the finding of a study published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry on 8 October, drawn from the Australian Government’s evaluation of the eating disorder Medicare items.
The plan assembles that team but does not fund it to meet. Each clinician is paid for their own sessions with the patient. The item that pays the GP, psychologist, dietitian and psychiatrist to sit down together about one patient is a case conference, and it sits outside the plan.
What patients said the team was worth
The authors, Courtney McLean, Deborah Mitchison, Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz and Siân McLean, surveyed 373 people who had sought treatment for an eating disorder. Of those, 264 had been treated under an eating disorder plan and 109 through other routes: a mental health treatment plan, a chronic disease management plan, public services, private insurance or paying out of pocket.
The survey asked 13 questions about specific parts of care. The plan group rated every one higher, and the widest gap of all was ‘providing access to a team of health professionals (e.g. mental health professional, dietitian, GP, psychiatrist and paediatrician)’: 4.06 on a five-point scale against 2.81, an effect the authors class as large.
The authors read the team result as the plan doing what it was designed to do. The differences ‘appear to reflect that the intentions of the EDP care model, namely, to provide multidisciplinary care involving general practitioners, psychiatrists, paediatricians, psychologists, occupational therapists, social workers and/or dietitians ... were indeed found to be beneficial by participants’. Other pathways fall short, they write, by ‘lacking explicit access to both dietetic and mental health professionals within any single care pathway’.
People outside the plan said the same thing from the other side. In that group, treatment that reduced their use of other health services was rated less helpful overall, which the authors suggest ‘may have been perceived by users as a lack of access to complementary support for their ED’.
‘These findings align with clinical guidelines for the management of EDs, which recognize that EDs, particularly anorexia nervosa, often necessitate longer and more comprehensive care provided by multidisciplinary teams.’
McLean et al, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 2026
What the plan funds, and what it leaves out
The plan pays for a GP assessment and referral, up to 40 psychological treatment sessions and 20 dietetic services, and a set of reviews in sequence: the GP after 10 sessions, the GP and a psychiatrist or paediatrician after 20, the GP again after 30. Every one of those is a clinician seeing the patient. None of them is the clinicians seeing each other.
So the GP who reviews at session 10 is working from a psychologist’s letter and a dietitian’s letter, if both have arrived, and from what the patient reports about the other two. The dietitian adjusting a meal plan may not know that the psychologist has just moved into the exposure phase of treatment. The psychologist may not know the GP is worried about the last set of bloods. Each member holds part of the picture, and the plan gives them no funded occasion to put the parts together.
The schedule funds that occasion separately. A GP who organises a case conference claims an organise item, and each participant claims their own, under either the mental health conference items introduced in 2023 or the community items. The rules on which patients, who may attend and the item numbers are on this site’s reference pages.
In an eating disorder, the conference is where weight, bloods and medical risk from the GP, intake and meal-plan adherence from the dietitian, and stage of therapy and motivation from the psychologist are heard in the same conversation, and where the team agrees what the next ten sessions are for. Held before a plan review, it means the clinician doing the review is informed by all three, and the review decides something the whole team has already discussed. The patient rated having the team as the plan’s greatest benefit; the conference is the point at which the team acts as one.
It reaches the patients outside the plan
The study found the people treated through other pathways were older, more likely to be male or gender diverse, and more likely to have binge eating disorder or avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. The authors call it ‘concerning that certain subgroups appear to have less success in accessing this type of care’. The community conference items are open to any Medicare-eligible patient, so a GP managing an eating disorder under a mental health treatment plan, or no plan at all, can still convene the team those respondents said they lacked.
About Conference.care
Conference.care is an Australian platform for running Medicare-funded case conferences, so it has an interest in how this evidence is read. The findings above are reported as the authors state them. On the platform, the GP convenes the conference and claims the item, the patient’s existing treating clinicians are invited, a missing discipline can be filled from anywhere in Australia, and each participant claims their own item. More on how it works is on the case conferencing page.
Sources
- McLean CP, Mitchison D, Fuller-Tyszkiewicz M, McLean SA. Perceived helpfulness of eating disorder treatment across healthcare service pathways in Australia. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. Published online 8 October 2026. doi.org/10.1177/00048674261490065 · open access. Survey items on the Open Science Framework.
- Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. Evaluation of the Eating Disorders Medicare Benefit Schedule Items 2024, from which the study’s data are drawn. health.gov.au.
- Medicare Benefits Schedule, case conference items and explanatory notes, as read on this site’s Medicare items page.
General information for clinicians, current at the date of publication. It is not clinical, financial or legal advice. Quotations and figures are from the published paper; readers making decisions about a patient’s care should read the study itself rather than rely on this summary. Conference duration, frequency and composition remain clinical decisions for the coordinating practitioner.